Describing the data

For your backend to work with Centurion UI, you must describe not only your data, but how you wish for it to be displayed.

The following parts of the UI require descriptions:

UI Routes
Navigation
Data fields
Data layout

As long as these items are described, the UI will display your backend data as per your descriptions. Additionally, every time you update your backend, you must add / update / remove any descriptions as necessary.

The formats of these descriptions can be found in the API documentation. All descriptions are in json.

Note

The API documentation is documentation on the actual code objects. When viewing the descriptions, take the following into account so as to assist in mapping a javascript code object to a json object.

An Interface should be considered a json dictionary
An Object should be considered a json dictionary
A Type should be considered a json type based off of what ever the type defines.
All other types as written should match the json types.

Assumptions

It is assumed that you already know what a json document is. If you do not, as it is outside of the scope of this documentation. You must learn it first. All descriptions that your backend supplies, must be valid json documents and with the correct structure as defined within this documentation.

UI Areas

For ease of documenting and explaining how to describe the UI, it has been broken down into the following areas:

UI Layout

Fig 1. Different areas of the UI.

Site Header is where the website name / logo is displayed as well as different tools.
Site Navigation This is where the links for the navigation will be displayed.
Page Content This area is where the data from the backend will be displayed.

All descriptions for the "Site" areas are obtained via a single apiRootMetadata request to the backend. Whereas the "Page Content" descriptions are obtained via an apiMetadata request to the backend whenever the user navigates.

UI Routes

UI Routes description is used to inform the UI what layouts are required for each path of the navigation. It is this description that defines what actual layout(s) will be used to display your data.

Navigation description is what is used to create the navigation menu that the user will see.

Page Content

The page content area does not have a single description. However what must be described for this area is the data and it's structure. What description you use is dependent upon what ever route layout was chosen. The UI fetches these descriptions in an apiMetadata request on the backend the data is being obtained from.

About:

This page forms part of our Project Centurion UI.

Page Metadata

Version: ToDo: place files short git commit here
Date Created: 2026-08-31
Date Edited: 2026-09-10

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